A Physarum-Inspired Approach to Optimal Supply Chain Network Design at Minimum Total Cost with Demand Satisfaction
This work addresses supply chain network design for industries needing cost-effective and adaptable solutions, but it appears incremental as it adapts biological principles to an existing optimization context.
The authors tackled the problem of designing optimal supply chain networks by minimizing total cost while satisfying demand, using a novel algorithm inspired by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, which achieved convergence to equilibrium states in numerical examples.
A supply chain is a system which moves products from a supplier to customers. The supply chains are ubiquitous. They play a key role in all economic activities. Inspired by biological principles of nutrients' distribution in protoplasmic networks of slime mould Physarum polycephalum we propose a novel algorithm for a supply chain design. The algorithm handles the supply networks where capacity investments and product flows are variables. The networks are constrained by a need to satisfy product demands. Two features of the slime mould are adopted in our algorithm. The first is the continuity of a flux during the iterative process, which is used in real-time update of the costs associated with the supply links. The second feature is adaptivity. The supply chain can converge to an equilibrium state when costs are changed. Practicality and flexibility of our algorithm is illustrated on numerical examples.